Lisa Owens - Not Working

“Igloos,” I say urgently to Mum, “like ‘he glues.’ Igloos it back together.”

“Oh,” says Mum. She pulls her coat tighter. “No. Preferred my one. He covers it snow-ver.” She laughs. “That’s much better. You should use my one next time you tell it.”

“Thanks,” I say, “but I’m going to stick with mine.”

“Where’s the pepper?” I ask, fanning all the cabinet doors open and shut in turn. I’m helping to set the table for dinner, but my parents have reorganized the kitchen and nothing is where it should be. “And the napkins. Hang on, don’t you even keep placemats here anymore?”

“Did you want to borrow some proper pants or a skirt or something before we eat?” Mum asks, clearly still disturbed by my slouchy leisurewear. “I’ve got a nice blouse you could put on too. And you can try on that dress I told you about. Did you get my message? Come up and I’ll show you. Wait — first, let me lend you a brush. What way is your hair under that paper thing? Not at its best.” She starts to dig, elbow-deep, in her handbag.

“Well, Mum,” I say, thumping down a jug of water, “ I’m not at my best. So thanks for pointing that out.”

“There’s no need to fly off at me. I just thought, you know—”

“A little bit of effort makes all the difference.” She flinches at the imitation, which isn’t even an imitation, really, more a sneery whine engineered to make her feel as small and ridiculous as possible. “I don’t care how I look right now, okay? I know I don’t always wear makeup and earrings and have my hair the way you think I should, and I’m sorry if that embarrasses you or upsets you to have to look at me not at my best ”—that voice again—“even inside the privacy of your own home. I get it. Okay? I get that I’m not the daughter you wanted!”

“Now, Claire,” says Dad from the stove, red plastic spatula raised like a warning. “There’s no need for that. Why don’t you go sit down in the other room while we finish up here? Take a breather. Go on, I’ll call you in when things are ready.”

I turn back to Mum. Her hands are still inside her bag, but they have ceased moving. Her mouth is in a troubled pinch.

“Please! Can you stop! Looking at me!”

She lowers her eyelids with such swift sorrow I’m instantly overcome by shame, and slide down against the cabinet to the floor, my face heavy in my hands. “Oh God. Of course I didn’t mean that.” My head goes back, smashes against the cabinet door, but I’ve had too much alcohol for it to hurt, and in any case I’ve just been stricken, really, properly for the very first time, by the idea of me with them as a baby, completely revelatory through the exhausted red-wine fog. “You’re my mother! You made me! Of course you want to look at me. I can’t believe I’ve never once said thank you!”

“For what?” says Mum.

“Everything! You — you both did, everything for me. Fed me, clothed me, changed my shitty diapers and nursed me through, like, chicken pox . You didn’t even have the Internet to check you were doing it right! And I’ve never said thank you. How fucking disgraceful is that?” I swipe away hot tears with the cuffs of Luke’s jumper, livid and astonished at my thoughtlessness.

“Claire, please, it’s all right, shh. Just…try to calm down, love, shh,” says Mum, clutching her elbows and leaning down toward me, wanting to help, but perhaps a little afraid to come close. I can only imagine how dreadful things look in the face department — pink eyes, nose red and glistening, mouth a downward gash like a tragedy mask — but it feels good to give in to this sorrow, so bleak and fathomless it’s almost funny.

“It isn’t all right! I know you didn’t really plan to have children, and I just came along and gate-crashed your lives, and I was such a ni-hight-mare that you didn’t want to have more! And now I’m…I don’t even know what I am, and I don’t know what to do with myself, I’m such, such, such a fuh-failure, and I’m pushing Luke away to Amer-hic-a, he didn’t even tell me, he’s running away, I’ve ruined everything, by being such, such, such a complete disa-ha-ster!” The tears take over completely, a descending scale of high-pitched sobs, uh-huh, huh, huh, so pitiful and childlike they sound put on. Mum — impelled maybe by some Neanderthal impulse — rushes to hold me and I cry into her coat, soaking the scratchy-soft fabric; then a moment later I feel the embrace intensify, as Dad, who might have just lost the job he’s had for forty years, moves in to complete our little tableau.

Once I’ve removed the froth of used tissues from the floor where I wept, downed a glass of water, washed my face and brushed my hair (Mum and I even managed to laugh at the latter), the three of us sit down to have dinner together. I’m ravenous, and devour two huge servings of spaghetti bolognese made with turkey mince — my parents haven’t allowed beef in the house since the Mad Cow hysteria of the mid-nineties.

“And now, some lovely fruitcake for dessert!” Dad announces, bearing it ceremoniously to the table. In what I take to be an effort to lighten the mood, he’s donned my paper crown.

“Hey — turkey and fruitcake, like Christmas,” I say.

“To make up for the one we missed with you,” says Mum, covering my hot, rough hand with her cool and moisturized one.

Back at the flat the next day, I bathe my face multiple times in warm water, hideous still from the crying jag. As I’m blotting them with the towel, my swollen eyes fall to the cup on the shelf above the sink, where my toothbrush and Luke’s stand at opposite sides, bristling stiffly away from each other.

“Too much,” I say to the universe.

“So. Johns Hopkins.”

Framed by the kitchen doorway, gaze downcast, Luke says, “What about it?”

“When were you going to tell me?”

He repositions himself so that he’s standing sideways, feet straddling the door. I watch him wind the doorknob tight, let go and recoil slightly as it shoots back.

“There wasn’t really any point.”

“If you want to break up, it might be worth just letting me know,” I say. “I mean, I’m getting the message pretty clearly as it is, but it’ll be over much quicker if you come out and say it.”

“Are you kidding?” he says with apparently authentic surprise. He actually sounds quite angry. “I don’t want to break up. Why? Do you?”

“No. I don’t.” I sit on my hands, so as not to bite my nails. “I assumed you wanted to. Why else would you keep something so big from me?”

“Because there’s nothing to tell.”

“What? They said you’d be there for six months — that doesn’t sound like nothing.”

“Who said that?”

“These terrible girls. Friends of Fiona’s who were at Polly’s dinner.”

“Yeah: Fiona’s going; I’m not.”

“Really?”

“You must have a pretty low opinion of me to think I’d just up and leave without telling you. And an even lower one of yourself.”

“Well… why aren’t you going?”

“Honestly? I didn’t think you were in the best place. To be left on your own.”

Puff-chested, I leap to protest. “That’s not really for you to—”

“Imagine if I’d been over in the States instead of here, getting those calls the other night. You throwing your guts up, sobbing down the phone, making absolutely no sense. Then Polly phoning in floods of tears, asking if she should get an ambulance, and how to put you in the recovery position. It was fucking scary, Claire.”